Guest Post: The Legend of Hollow SEO Myths I Grew Up Hearing

Puhleeezzzz! Listen to me. I am SEO, the most misunderstood term in the digital marketing industry. Why do people not understand that I am not the only one who is responsible to get you more conversions. There are many other aspects to getting more conversions, and people just blame me if they are not able to get more of it.

Let us understand and debunk some more of such myths associated with SEO and how it is perceived by a major number of SEO Experts as well as amateurs, who may have been successful to rank for irrelevant keywords – but not for a long time.

1. Ranking Guaranteed

The search engine industry is the most unpredictable one. What with all the new algorithm updates emerging with each passing day, if there is an internet marketing company that guarantees you ranking, beware of them. There is no such thing like guarantee to get your site on the top. Of course, there are blackhat techniques to boost your site to the top, but it will decline just as fast, and the worst case scenario, your website may get penalized and never get indexed again. When doing SEO, you have to be persistent and patient.

2. It takes months for SEO to show results

SEO is not all about time. If your SEO EXPERT is saying that it will take some time to get the rankings, it is time that you should be asking questions. As time is not the only factor about SEO. SEO is in fact, a competition between the other websites which are ranking high and are probably staying updated with the the industry changes. No matter how many months the SEO expert tells you, your campaign is going nowhere without an analysis of the website and rankings of your competitors. Thus, time is not the only deciding factor for your website’s ranking. Content plays a significant factor if you want your website to be crawled and indexed frequently, but that is the only thing about time. Your blog, if updated everyday, is more likely to attract the search engines’ crawlers than a blog that does not update itself everyday. It doesn’t take months for your website to go high in rankings, if you show some promise with some exceptional content.

3. You don’t need images. Only Content will work

But you need images. A website which has exceptional content and backed up with relevant and equally attractive images has more changes to make it to the top of search engines and deliver the message to the audience clearly. The search engines take human behavior into account and rank those which they feel would click more with the audience. It’s not only about the search engines, just think how much your user retention will go up and the bounce rate will decline considerably if you are incorporating images and video on your webpage, supplementing your outstanding content.

4. No-follow links doesn’t matter

Google and other major search engines don’t like play. They prefer natural way of optimization. They are always on the lookout for something unnatural, and a website with do-follow backlinks will always be on the top of their list of suspicious activities. So, rather than looking into websites with do-follow or no-follow, just go for those sites and blogs that are relevant to your industry niche, and make sure that you deliver high quality content that shows that you are the authority.

If no-follow links really didn’t matter, Google wouldn’t be considering all the outbound links on Wikipedia just like that, which are no-follow links. The no-follow links given by Wikipedia are considered worthy by Google and other search engines.

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5. Meta keywords still work

They counted, but only in the stone age of search engines. The meta keywords factor was so overused, and the keywords were so overstuffed, that meta-keywords are now completely disregarded by search engines. Meta descriptions, if not used properly, could prove to be disastrous for your website. So, it is advisable to hire a copy-writer to get it written from.

6. Better if you have more backlinks

Once again, just check out for relevance. If you see the ‘Disavow’ feature in the Google Webmasters, you will come to know that there are thousands of links which are ineffective, and harmful to your ranking and most importantly, your website. Getting backlinks from anything that comes your way is not a good practice anymore. Go for websites which are relevant to your niche.

7. You can pay search engines for top rankings

Search engines like Yahoo, could only help you in getting indexed faster for a price. However, organic ranking is not possible in any other way than optimization. If you want to spend money, spend it on the quality of your website, content, format and various other aspects.

Domain Authority is just a way of knowing the potential of your back-links. All you need to check out is the backlinks to a particular page which has a higher domain authority. It could be external and internal. The host domain is just like any other domain. You simply need to know which are those relevant sites, which the domain has used for it’s link-building process. If your competitors have one link from the home-page, get a link from a page which has more authority than their page and you would be able to beat them.

9. SEO and SMM are complete strangers for each other

Not anymore. You might have witnessed a lot of article pages which are not even on the first page of search engines, while the Facebook page is right there on top 5. You need to diversify in order to multiply. There are many factors that you could implement on your social media optimization campaign, which in turn will help you in gaining rank on search engines. Start including social media into your online marketing project, as not doing so will bury you way down in search engines.

10. I have finished my SEO project

An SEO project is never finished. This is the silliest myth that once you have got the desired ranking, the game is over and you are all set. You need to constantly monitor your website’s performance on the major search engines through a number of analytics and stay closely updated, not doing so will result into your competitors taking your place. Also, there are a number of algorithm updates happening on a daily basis at Google, which is causing a havoc to a number of search queries. Thus, it is vital to stay ahead and make sure that you gain more out of your SEO project.

There is an endless list of the myths associated with SEO. Thus, it is more important to know the basics before plunging into any decisions. Always remember, in an ever-changing industry like the SEO, you always need to stay abreast with all the happenings and implement the best strategies. Stress on relevance and you are the winner.

About Sanket Patel

Sanket Patel – Main Operator at BlurbPoint Media, A Digital Marketing Agency specializing in Contextual Link bait. Heading a team of 100+ digital marketers and responsible for the ROI of more than 110+ clients. Fond of online research and contribute fruitful stuff on Internet.